There are a few niche communities that are doing well here. The Trekkies that meme over at risa, the NCD crowd and their Military-Industrial Complex fetish, and the meme community in general is fairly healthy and active.

But I agree with you that there isn’t that critical mass that Reddit has that allows organic niche growth to occur. We’re simply too small. Even small Reddit communities like /r/Kenshi (131k) or /r/Factorio (347k) have more subscribers than the entirety of all Lemmy instances (60k). It’s impossible to compete when there is such a mismatch of scale, especially against behemoths like /r/funny with subscriber bases in the millions.

What can we do? Just keep making this place our home. Post interesting things you find on the Internet, copypasta memes, that sort of stuff. I don’t know if it’ll grow it but if enough of us do this it won’t stagnate.